This memory goes back to my childhood – bear with me as it will take a while to set the scene. I was born, and lived my pre-teen years, in England. This was during the 1930’s and 40’s. England was a very different place then. There was still much of the class system in evidence and of course there was The War. I lived on the Isle of Wight. A rather bucolic locale of the summer resort genre. My parents had ambitions for me which involved a better education and a more refined accent than I was likely to acquire
where we were then living, so decided that I should be sent to a boarding school near the great metropolis of London. Accordingly, one evening when I was ten years old, my father came into my bedroom and asked me to sing. To sing! What on earth was this about? No one sang in our house. He cajoled, pleaded and threatened. All to no avail. I withdrew into tears.
I was then informed that I was to be taken to London the next day and there would be a man there who would expect me to sing and I had damn well better do it. It was to be an audition for a choir school – a
place where fees were discounted if the boy (and it was only boys) sang in the choir of one of the wealthy London churches. As it turned out I was not required to sing at the audition. With the wisdom of age, I suspect
that as long as my parent could come up with the required fee I was guaranteed a place.

The trip from home to the school had entailed a journey by train from our home in Cowes to Ryde. There we changed from the train to a tram car to take us to the end of a pier where we transferred to the boat to Southampton. Then we changed to another train to take us to Waterloo station in London. Finally came a change to a local train to the village of Bexley where the school was located. My mother accompanied me for the audition. I was accepted and began to undertake the journey, from home to school and back, several times each year. I travelled alone. No parent, no guardian, no adult. And I did so, making all the connections and changes, without once getting lost, and to the best of my memory without asking for directions. In those shy days, a child knew his place
and rarely initiated contact with an adult for any reason. A different age. A different world.

The only thing I ever recall from any of those trips over the course of three years – and here is the memory – occurred in the spring, probably of 1947. I was looking out of the train window as we travelled through Kent and I saw fields of wild daffodils. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life.